I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Blasphemy: Muslims' Catchall Phrase To Repress Dissent

‘Blasphemy’ And ‘Terrorism’ Are
Catchall Phrases To Repress Dissent: Assertions of both have become favorite
terms employed by authoritarian and autocratic leaders. “Blasphemy” has joined
“terrorism” as a catchall phrase to intimidate, incarcerate and kill critics
and political opponents, as well as stifle unfettered debate and settle scores.

There is, however, one difference: terrorism is a justification for
curbing freedom of expression often used by governments irrespective of how
democratic or undemocratic they may be. Blasphemy serves not only as a tool for
governments but has also empowered religious ultra-conservatives, frenzied
mobs, and extremist groups and individuals.

A four-decade long, massively funded Saudi public diplomacy campaign has
created an enabling environment in Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan and
Bangladesh, where alleged blasphemers and atheists have been kidnapped, abused
and sometimes killed in recent months and years.

The Saudi campaign was designed to
implant Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism in Muslim communities across the globe
as an antidote to the faded zeal of revolutionary Iran and position the kingdom
rather than the Islamic republic as the dominant power in the Middle East and
Muslim world beyond. It has fostered a world of ultra-conservatism that lives
its own life often independent of the kingdom.

A Saudi court last month sentenced a
man to death on charges of blasphemy and atheism. The sentence sparked debate
on Twitter with many applauding the sentence. Another Saudi was last year
sentenced to ten years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing atheist
sentiments on social media.

Muslim Nations Lobbying for Outlawing Blasphemy

Mad Saudis want to behead every Islamophobe in this world.
(And Trudeau Canada wants to accommodate that desire.)

Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations
have been lobbying in recent years for the criminalization of blasphemy in
international law in a move that would legitimize curbs on free speech and
growing Muslim intolerance towards any open discussion of their faith. The
kingdom’s ability to further its efforts was enhanced last November when it was
elected as a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Assertions of blasphemy and terrorism
have become favorite terms employed by illiberal, authoritarian and autocratic
leaders to crush their opponents. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has
used terrorism allegations to arrest tens of thousands and fire more than
100,000 civil servants, teachers, professors, journalists, judicial personnel,
and police and military officers.

In January, persons believed to be
associated with security forces kidnapped and abused five Pakistani bloggers
critical of the military under the guise of blasphemy. The Pakistani government
last month put social media companies like Facebook and Twitter in a bind by
demanding that they help identify users so they could be prosecuted on charges
of blasphemy that carry the death sentence. The demand was part of a clampdown
on blasphemous material on social media.

The Saudi public diplomacy effort was
frequently enhanced by governments who saw mileage in polishing their religious
credentials for politically opportunistic reasons at the cost of building
societies that embraced principles of tolerance and pluralism. The result is
pervasive intolerance that sparks frequent attacks on minorities. Recent events
in Egypt and Pakistan serve as evidence.

Writing more than a decade before last
month’s attack on two Coptic churches in Egypt that left 43 people dead,
Egyptian writer and politician Milad Hanna noted that many of Egypt’s
schoolteachers had either worked in Saudi Arabia or been trained at
Saudi-funded satellite campuses of Cairo’s Al Azhar University, one of the
world’s foremost institutions of Islamic learning.

Some of them would separate Muslim and
Coptic students in their classrooms to underscore the differences in their
religious standing. History lessons would ignore Egypt’s pre-Islamic Coptic
heritage, leaving students with the impression that Copts were migrants rather
than Egyptians with a history in the country that pre-dated Islam or had been
converted to Islam in the 19th century by foreign missionaries.

“A belief in the superiority of Muslims... is drummed into Egyptian
schoolchildren from their earliest years through the state education system.
This is reinforced by unequal laws (the president can only ever be a Muslim,
for example) and practice (Copts were long excluded from senior positions in
the police, army and even academia),” said Gerard Russell, a former British
diplomat and United Nations official, echoing recent Islamist opposition in
Indonesia to a Christian being governor of Jakarta.

“When I lived in Egypt, back in 1998,
Copts made frequent complaints about a ban on new churches or even the repair
of existing ones – a prohibition which didn’t seem to apply to mosques. Attacks
on Copts in the course of disputes (as opposed to terrorism) would go virtually
unpunished. In one appalling example, in al-Kosheh in 1999, 21 Copts and one
Muslim were killed; only the killer of the Muslim was ever convicted,” Mr.
Russell added.

Mob Lynching Of University Student Mashal Khan

The recent mob killing in Pakistan of
23-year-old journalism student Mashal Khan illustrated how unproven blasphemy
charges incited mob justice and can be abused by branches of government, local
institutions, and individuals to either suppress criticism or settle scores.

Mr. Khan’s killing was nonetheless a
rare instance in which some ultra-conservatives joined liberals in condemning
mob justice in a country that has draconic anti-blasphemy laws on its books
that date back to the period of British colonial rule and has allowed the
killer of a prominent critic of the law to be celebrated.

“Mashal Khan’s case was an expression
of collective behaviour of extremism, which can be invoked and exploited by
interest groups for mala fide intentions. This can also be called the ‘criminal
exploitation of extremism’, in which criminals take advantage of the masses’
religious sentiments, knowing that the state and its institutions will hesitate
to take action.

These attitudes are creating a
conducive environment for ultra- and hyper-extremist groups to operate in the
vulnerable spaces that exist in every class and institution in Pakistan,” said
Pakistani security analyst Mohammad Amir Rana.

Mr. Khan criticized his university for
poor management on local television three days before an angry mob shot him
dead and then beat and stomped his bloodied, lifeless body in a frenzy that was
filmed and posted online.

A document that surfaced after the
murder suggested that the university had banned Mr. Khan and two other students
from entry to campus while a committee investigated their alleged ‘blasphemous
activities.’ “The accusation of blasphemy was a tool to inflame sentiment,”
said one of Mr. Khan’s teachers.

Mr. Khan’s death has sparked debate in
Pakistan about an amendment, opposed by Islamists and ultra-conservatives, that
would explicitly reiterate the state’s exclusive prerogative to prosecute
blasphemy cases.

The degree to which ultra-conservatism
has fostered violence and intolerance was highlighted two weeks after Mr.
Khan’s killing when hundreds of worshipers attacked a man after weekly prayers
in Pakistan’s remote northern Chitral region.

The mob accused the man of blaspheming
in the mosque. Police took him into custody, but people stormed the station
house and demanded that he be handed over. Police officials, who said the
victim might be mentally impaired, had to use tear gas and fire into the air to
disperse the mob.

“Mashal Khan was killed because our culture sanctions killing. There is
no public agenda for carrying out a war on the inhuman, subversive and barbaric
dimensions of our culture exercised through honor killings, tribal feuds and
panchayats (local governments ordering gang rapes). Clerics are increasingly
issuing edicts against minorities and ‘non-practicing Muslims’. The state needs
to do better than witnessing it all as a bystander. Otherwise, Pakistan will
continue its downward march to Hobbes’s state of nature where people are at
each other’s throats,” said scholar Mohammad Waseem.

The threat goes beyond Mr. Waseem’s
concerns. The threat is the abuse of labels like terrorism and blasphemy by
governments; institutions, religious and political groups and individuals alike
that create an environment that not only fosters intolerant violence and
disrespect for the other, but also enables vigilantism, extremism, and
radicalization. It renders the rule of law impotent and legitimizes extra-judicial
killings whether by mobs in Pakistan or authorities in the Philippines.

(Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute
for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer
blog, a book with the same title, Comparative Political Transitions between
Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr.
Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario and three forthcoming books, Shifting Sands, Essays
on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa as well as Creating
Frankenstein: The Saudi Export of Ultra-conservatism and China and the Middle
East: Venturing into the Maelstrom.)